Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The prodigal returns

    So, remember a month ago I wondered about this new Mystery Commenter who went by the name “Hammill” and whose central, indeed almost only, subject seemed to be the sadly naughty ways of the gnu atheists, and who showed a strangely excessive interest in me, and Jerry Coyne, and me again? Remember how I said it reminded me of someone? Remember how I said that someone was “Tom Johnson”/You’re Not Helping/William?

    Well that’s who it is. I’ve been able to confirm it.

    So?

    So the discussion has been distorted by a guy with a known agenda and history posing as someone new and unknown. Someone who frowned gently in concern that people disagreed with Chris Mooney. Someone who worries about people “throwing around” the word “lies”…

    Just look at the terms used to describe positions: unfair representation, misrepresentation, intellectual dishonesty. I think the terms “lies” and “deliberate distortion” have been thrown around in the past. I realize that much of that language stems from the “blood feud” you mention above, but the division seems great and very real. IMO the blood feud is getting in the way of actual progress.

    That’s Tom Johnson, the guy who lied about that notorious conference where the notorious things he described didn’t happen. That’s YNH, who repeatedly said on his blog I was telling lies here. That’s Milton C, who told lies about me in comments here.

    So?

    So he’s saddened by the rough and tumble of the “blogosphere“:

    Part of me almost wishes that the entire debate were taking place in a refereed journal rather than the blogosphere, due to the inherent incivility that the internet brings. Perhaps that could corral the personal disputes a bit and focus a laser beam on the core issues.

    That’s YNH, who knows a thing or two about incivility on the internet!

    He spent the months between July and January honing his skills, perhaps. He was a good bullshitter, for awhile.

    There are much deeper issues at play in terms of communication than “stop being so loud” and “stop talking so frequently.” The issue seems much more nuanced and complex than this, perhaps by several orders of magnitude; however, I believe it often erroneously gets simplified down to the statement above, and the debate suffers because of it.

    Sounds convincing, doesn’t he.

    He didn’t, quite, to me, even then. People don’t usually talk that stiffly on blogs. He was hyper-correcting, as it were. And then where had he come from, all of a sudden? He seemed awfully familiar with the subject matter for someone unknown. But I was only generally suspicious. At first.

    But so what?

    So he poisoned the well, that’s what.

    I appreciate this piece very much, Andrew. I’m a nonbeliever that is frequently ashamed to be associated with some of the vitriol that comes from our side of the aisle. We need more people, like yourself, to speak out for a positive, forward-looking kind of nonbelief….

    ….even if doing so only directs the vitriol in your direction. I’ve noticed the link above leads to site where you are being accused of not being a nonbeliever simply for your opinions on tone. Furthermore, some of the vitriol and invective (ignorant, arrogant, immoral, unethical, bitter, bullsh@t, etc.) directed at you is disturbing. Include the discussion about what to call “pseudoatheists” like yourself and the message seems clear: the goal is to marginalize you and bully you into not seeking to take nonbelief in a positive direction.

    “The link above” is, of course, to B&W. I loom large in his pantheon of hate-objects. He’s doing his little bit to swell the chorus of hatred against the evil gnus, and he’s doing it in a mask, because all his previous masks got covered in excrement which won’t wash off.

    And not just once. Another opportunity presented itself, and there he was, all eager for the treat:

    I can agree with much of the substance coming out of the gnu atheist community but cringe mostly at its delivery. At times the rhetoric and invective makes me embarrassed to even be associated with them, however tangentially, as a nonbeliever.

    Same old thing. That was when I really suspected he was TJ, and I confronted him:

    We’ve seen this kind of thing before.

    Will you be shyly confiding in “Rob” about your experiences at conservation conferences soon?

    Who are you?

    As far as I know he hasn’t commented since. Sad for him. But he’s had plenty of effect, there’s no reason to doubt that. That bolus of antignu hatred is larger than it would have been without him.

    Update: and see Paul W’s comment on the stranger thread. Says it all.

  • Lauryn Oates on the heroism of Sunita Murmu

    She confronted the mob mentality that erupted into an actual physical mob, as they stripped, taunted and harassed a young girl because she had fallen in love.

  • Report on the Templeton Foundation [pdf]

    The stated aims of the Foundation have evolved over the years, although there is evidence that its actual aims have not.

  • Friends are afraid for Sherry Rehman

    Of the three brave Pakistani politicians who stood up for Aasia Bibi, just one is still alive: Sherry Rehman.

  • Paper says Bhatti’s assassination was fault of US

    A widely read newspaper, Jang, said it was a “heinous conspiracy against Pakistan” and a result of American pressure on Pakistan to combat terrorism.

  • Goddy physicist takes on militant atheists

    Here’s what you do: you say it’s all scientism.

  • Shahbaz Bhatti and the Death of Reason

    My time in Pakistan was glorious.  I taught bright, beautiful and hopeful students who saw the world not as a series of entitlements but rather as a steep staircase to be climbed, littered with challenges set up by a crooked government that lunged from disaster to catastrophe.  It is easy in such circumstances to forget that Pakistan was founded on a crest of hope that soon dissipated into old rivalries, pissing contests between elites, indifference to the mountain men of the Pashto borderlands, suspicion (much of it justified) of eastern and western geopolitics, and an infrastructure that in every decade after 1950 fell further and further behind its more progressive western neighbor and rival–India.

    But that is history.  Pakistan treated the Sikhs badly, turning the once Sikh-dominated Punjab and its lead city Lahore into a dying old man with dreams of former glory.  In hard times, given the choice between restoring a splendid (Non-Islamic) religious shrine or buying another nuclear warhead, you can bet the bricks will continue to fall from the shrine. I wasn’t in Lahore long enough to know the city well.  I was just there long enough to know that it was a city of disappointments. –Symbolic of the country as a whole.

    The biggest disappointment was the disappointment of the young. Stuck with a government that looks like it was strung together with character actors from a gypsy jamboree, they wait impatiently while it plods on–blaming the west for the ills it has foisted on itself. Insofar as any nation’s government reflects the average face of the nation, they find it hard to swallow western criticism, not least because western criticism is dull (often duller than they are), uninformed, and monotonous. 

    There is even a segment of the young and hopeful population that has to be seen biblically: when things got politically impossible for the Jews in the first century of the common era and it was clear to even the most political that their time was running put, they looked to the heavens for deliverance, a messiah.  One of those apocalyptic sects was pacifist—the Christians—not all, not uniformly but mainly.  Others, like the zealots and sicarii were contract killers and had they lived into the modern era, they would have been suicide bombers.  The fallacies of the sociology of history are many; but I stake my claim on the fact that Pakistan is going violently downhill because it has entered into the apocalyptic age.

    The assassination of Pakistani Christian Shahbaz Bhatti, the government leader for minority religious affairs, is symbolic of that hopelessness. It follows closely on the heels of the murder of Pakistani Muslim Salman Taseer who had criticized the  blasphemy laws. 

    The laws themselves date from the British era, and were subject to a number of revisions through the time of Independence in 1947. From imprisonment and fines, the law, under Zia-ul-Haq, degenerated further in 1986 with a death penalty for defaming Islam. The current (post-2008) controversy springs from the case of Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman, who was sentenced to death last November after being found guilty of insulting the Prophet Mohammed following a row with Muslim women in her village. According to Human Rights Watch, Aasia was “charged under the blasphemy law after a June 2009 altercation with fellow farm workers who refused to drink water she had touched, contending it was unclean because she was a Christian.” 

    The operant offensive sections of the law are these:

    Section 295: Insult

    “Injuring or defiling place of worship, with Intent to insult the religion of any class: Whoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction damage or defilement as an insult to their religion. Shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine, or with both.”

    Section 295-A: Deliberate insult — imprisonment for 10 years, fine

    “Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting Its religion or religious beliefs: Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging the religious feelings of any class of the citizens of Pakistan, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations insults the religion or the religious beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, or with fine, or with both.”

    Section 295-B: Defiling — life imprisonment

    “Defiling, etc., of Holy Qur’an: Whoever wilfully defiles, damages or desecrates a copy of the Holy Qur’an or of an extract therefrom or uses it in any derogatory manner or for any unlawful purpose shall be punishable with imprisonment for life.”

    Let me repeat my assertion this is not a free speech issue—not yet.  It is an attempt to remove from the books laws that belong to a sect that rejects the ability of the human animal to reason.

    The day before I left Lahore to return to the States, the country was ablaze with gossip that Christians were stuffing pages of the Quran down toilets.  The rumours were (almost certainly) spread by children.  Whatever the source, it is a recurrent pathological lie dragged out on cue by troublemakers.  There are always thousands willing to believe it, such is the religious insecurity of the country. A fraction of that number will kill Christians because they believe it—behavior according to type.

    But there is a lesson here.

    It is time for the Pakistani government to acknowledge that only when blasphemy laws are repealed is a religion deserving of respect.  Religions will not do that: protected status is their writ of survival and dominance. Only a nation-state can do that. Only when it is no longer an offense against the state to criticize the worst and most repugnant elements of religion can a religion begin to talk about tolerance.  Officially, as opposed to the Islamic diaspora currying favor in the west, that has not happened in the Islamic world. And only when a religion is able to define tolerance should it be entitled to  suggest (not demand) to any other nation or any world body–like the United Nations– that it deserves respect simply because it is a religion.

    Pakistan so far has followed just the opposite course.  While practicing intolerance and the murder of innocent nonconformists at home, it deigns to lecture the world on the prerogatives of Islam.  Almost bizarrely, it then dances a dance of death and calls it life: defends truth through murder, and righteousness with violence.  

    I am an unbeliever who knows the sins of the west as well as any citizen of the realm.  I will shed a tear for the crusades, or for the Raj, or for the arrogance of the west if I have to.  But that is hardly the place to begin modern discussion

    So let me remind our Muslim brothers and sisters that there is not nearly as much Muslim blood on Christian hands as there is Christian blood on Muslim hands. I hate to put it so starkly, and I am likely to be bludgeoned with statistics from Iraq and Afghanistan. But bludgeon me as you will, I do not think those conflicts were religious.  I do not think they would have eventuated without the apocalyptic mentality that still dominates the religious ethos of the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic world.  

    And I do not think—believe it or not—that most Americans who had to fight those dirty battles did it as Christians. That is my rejoinder, take it or leave it.

    But the murder of Shabaz Bhatti is a pathological symptom of religious dysfunction in real time.  By synergy, it includes his family and the not quite 3,000,000 Christians remaining (not for long) in Pakistan. Change the mood, and you can substitute the name “Lebanon,” where the entire absurd Constitution is based on a census taken when almost half the population was Christian.

    What of course makes the blame-the-west message harder to sell however is not the death of Christians in an Islamic country.  It is the death of so many Muslims who find tolerance, co-existence, and simple justice a “foreign” concept–an un-Islamic one.  We have a long way to go before this becomes a matter of free speech.

  • Fetuses to “testify” to Ohio House committee

    Via ultrasound. Srsly.

  • There’ll be music everywhere

    PBS showed a Tribute to Motown at the White House last night. I thought I would watch just a minute of it, but I got pulled right in.

    I’d kind of forgotten Dancing in the Streets. That was stupid. Martha and the Vandellas. Yeah.

  • Taliban lash girl for refusing a forced marriage

    Two Taliban men held her down while a third man whipped her.

  • Bhatti had been receiving death threats

    He had said fatwas had been issued calling for him to be beheaded, by extremist clerics who were allowed to spread messages of violence with impunity.

  • Salman Rushdie on the secular revolution

    At its most optimistic – this could be the moment when the Islamic world moves beyond Islamism.

  • Pakistan: minorities minister murdered

    Shahbaz Bhatti, an advocate of reform of the country’s blasphemy laws and a Christian, was killed by gunmen in Islamabad.

  • Norway is going to hell

    It’s that wicked high literacy rate.

  • Meta x 11

    A couple of thoughts on the hunting of the snark.

    One thought is that I always wonder why the focus is so exclusively on the evil gnu atheists. To put it another way, I always wonder why the standard is so double. I wonder why the filter has only gnu atheist-shaped holes.

    I wonder why the sustained activities of “Tom Johnson” are ignored in favor of shining a spotlight on something someone said five years ago. Gnu atheists are sometimes irritable, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes rude. “Tom Johnson” is a malicious misogynist liar who put great energy into attempting to smear several chosen gnu atheists. Why so much heavy breathing about the former and nothing at all about the latter? It’s not because the latter is irrelevant – he’s an enthusiastic partisan in the “gnu atheists are horrible” campaign. He is in fact the source of a lot of specific “gnu atheists are horrible” claims.

    Like this one, which I had forgotten about. Milton C, May 27 last year. I didn’t know at the time that Milton C was “Tom Johnson” and all the YNH bloggers and all the YNH sock puppets, who were many.

    The Ruler of Comment Overmoderation whines about comment moderation. Hm.

    The irony – it BURNS.

    See? That’s the confirmed confessed liar who filled whole threads at The Intersection with tirades about new atheists under different names, thus creating an impression of lots of haters of new atheists, then did the same thing with his own brand new blog. He’s accusing me of “comment overmoderation” – which is something he had been accusing me of via the YNH sock puppets for several weeks by that time. It’s a pack of lies.

    Then this, after I retorted.

    idk, Ophelia. I’ve been a “lurker” here for some time, and I’ve seen you engage in ‘total banning’ on some people who have made comments that really didn’t get too offensive or inconsiderate but that you just took personally…but I’ve also seen you engage in ‘total banning’ when people have been purposefully inconsiderate and offensive, too.

    Complete and utter falsehood. (How can one “see” people engage in banning anyway? All he had seen, of course, was himself saying that under different names at my place and at his place.)

    That’s morally repugnant, if you like. It’s a good deal more morally repugnant than sometimes being irritable under one’s own name and for truthfully-stated reasons. Yet the shock-horror is reserved for the latter. I consider that peculiar.

    The other thought is about this comment – #4 on yesterday’s –

    Well, it’s certainly a little ironic that the very same bloggers who leaped to condemn Sarah Palin’s incendiary rhetoric (perhaps with justification) are quite content to use this sort of language. Wasn’t there a suggestion somewhere that people on the “accommodationist” side of this debate, should be called “Quislings”? It’s classy stuff.

    That’s for me. If you google new atheist quisling, I’m the first result. I did it.

    Or I did and I didn’t. I didn’t do it in a Sarah Palinesque way. I did it in a hedged way.

    Here is another…can we say quisling? If they call us aggressive new atheists, can we call them quislings? Here is another quisling atheist moaning about how boring and boring the gnu* atheists are. It’s Caspar Melville of the New Humanist, I’m sorry to say – I like the NH.

    The real irony though is that Caspar was so horrified by my morally repugnant remark that he invited me to write an article on the subject. In other words, he probably did think it was a bit much, but also probably not the nadir of verbal wickedness.

  • LSE investigates Saif Gaddafi plagiarism claims

     Allegations have emerged that he used a ghost writer, and copied sections of his thesis.

  • John Esposito says “mainstream Islamists” are fine

    They just want normal mainstream humdrum theocracy, not the bad scary extreme kind.

  • Child brides in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa

    One bad effect of early marriage is the exclusion of women from education in favour of domestic work and child rearing.

  • Telegraph pitches a fit about secular law

    How dare judges not enforce theocracy?!

  • Woman with measles spent time at 3 airports

    Too bad she hadn’t been vaccinated.